lake effect

When your résumé includes experiences like standing atop Piez Hall measuring the wind speed as the Blizzard of ’77 rolls in off Lake Ontario, where else would your career take you but before the cameras of The Weather Channel as the Winter Weather Expert?

Luckily Tom Niziol ’77 made it down off that roof safely. Now he draws on his Oswego snow schooling and a 30-year career with the National Weather Service in Buffalo in his role with the country’s premier source for consumer weather information.

Winter break’s heavy snows and a radar-lugging vehicle known as a Doppler-on-Wheels have enabled Professor Scott Steiger ’99 and several meteorology students to witness never-before-seen phenomena — like a line of seven tornado-like waterspouts in one lake-effect storm — and to collect unique data.

An $86,000 grant from the National Science Foundation will provide SUNY Oswego meteorology faculty member Scott Steiger ’99 and his students the tools to chase the most intense snowstorms and collect first-of-its-kind data.